Boing Boing » memeshttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsSat, 01 Aug 2015 22:45:14 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2Why Impact is the "meme font"http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 12:11:08 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=409075the meme font had itself become a meme."]]>
Vox explains how the stout 1965 typeface became the text of choice for internet silliness: because is was included with Windows, and by the time anyone had a choice, "the meme font had itself become a meme."]]>http://boingboing.net/2015/07/27/why-impact-is-the-meme-font.html/feed0Feminist Mad Max meme is an MRA’s nightmarehttp://boingboing.net/2015/05/26/feminist-mad-max-meme-is-an-mr.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/26/feminist-mad-max-meme-is-an-mr.html#commentsTue, 26 May 2015 10:00:42 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=391026The Tumblr Feminist Mad Max combines the feminist charms of the Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” meme with the feminist charms of Mad Max: Fury Road.]]>

The epic faceplant GIF is the Mom’s apple pie of online culture. Representative of all that the Internet stands for, it is reliable and true blue. Many things will change. You will age. Life will be irrevocably altered. But there will always be some poor soul--or idiot--falling flat on their face, over and over and over.

The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery recently published a clinical study analyzing the forces at work on the face of one such young man. Titled “Video Analysis of the Biomechanics of a Bicycle Accident Resulting in Significant Facial Fractures”, the paper claims to be the first analysis of an actual recorded faceplant trauma. That may be true for bicycle accidents, but it’s not the only time scientists have used video of an impact to understand what happens to the faces involved in that collision. In fact, the most interesting takeaway here isn’t from this paper, itself, but from the window it provides into a scientific field — injury biomechanics, the study of how we hurt ourselves.

First, some background. Thomas Jenkyn is a mechanical engineer at The University of Western Ontario, who works with plastic surgeons from the medical school. Through that connection, he got a hold of a video, showing a young man attempting to ride a bicycle off the shoreline, onto a dock, and off a ramp into a lake. To cross the gap between the shoreline and dock, the young man was supposed to ride along a board “bridge”. But he missed it. Instead, the front wheel of the bike hit the dock’s edge, flipping the bike forward, and plowing the young man’s face into the dock. FAIL, as the kids say.

The good news is that this kid turned out alright. Eventually. He did have a massive facial fracture and had to go to the ER, but he’s okay now, Jenkyn says. His reputation, on the other hand, may never be the same. Although he’s been anonymized here for science, the young man’s faceplant was on YouTube before he’d even made it to the hospital.

When Jenkyn watched the video, though, he saw more than just an example of youthful stupidity. He saw an opportunity to document the biomechanical forces of an accident, as it happens in the real world.

“The body is a structure like any other, it just happens to be alive,” Jenkyn told me. “Forces and pressures get loaded onto it in different ways and if they get too big the body breaks.” Injury biomechanics is the science of how and when those forces break the body. Scientists use cadavers and crash test dummies to test the results of different impacts at different forces. What they learn becomes the basis of designing better safety equipment for the automotive industry, sports teams, and the military. In fact, the father of injury biomechanics was an Air Force flight surgeon named John Stapp.

Shortly after World War II, Stapp began a series of tests aimed at designing ejection seats that wouldn’t hurt the pilots they were meant to save. To understand how the seats were injuring people, Stapp ran experiments on living humans — frequently himself — subjecting them to high speeds followed by sudden stops. Just sitting at the computer, reading this story, you’re experiencing a g-force of 1. On December 10, 1954, Stapp strapped himself into a rocket sled, set a land-speed record, and then set a record for the greatest g-force ever experienced by a human when the brakes kicked in. He broke almost all the capillaries in his eyes, but by surviving 46.2 g’s of force, Stapp proved that pilots could eject from a supersonic aircraft — experiencing the massive deceleration that happens when a not-very-aerodynamic human body hits the relatively slow air after leaving a superfast jet. All they needed was the right safety equipment.

Thomas Jenkyn hoped his video analysis would help injury biomechanics researchers better understand a kind of facial fracture called a Le Fort 2, where the face cracks in a triangle shape from one side of the upper jaw, over the top of the nose, and back down to the other side. While there are very few people who go around riding bikes into docks, that’s not the only way you can end up with a Le Fort 2. It’s the sort of injury that people can get when they go over the handlebars of a bike, Jenkyn said. It’s also an injury that can happen when a face impacts an air bag — better than what might have happened if the face had hit a steering wheel, but still unpleasant. The more scientists understand the force it takes to produce this fracture and what happens to the bone when the fracture happens, the better a job they can do designing bicycle safety equipment and air bags, and advising surgeons on how to fix Le Fort 2 fractures.

Unfortunately, this study doesn’t really do much to help that, according to injury biomechanics engineers Stefan Duma and Joseph Cormier. Duma is the head of the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. Cormier is a researcher with the Biodynamic Research Corporation. Both of them told me that the Jenkyn paper didn’t bring anything new to the table. In fact, they both found some pretty serious flaws. Chief among those problems is the fact that the video Jenkyn and his team use to analyze the accident is really low quality. It’s just a video somebody took on a camera phone, which captured images at 30 frames a second. An impact like the one in the video can be done in as little as 10-20 milliseconds, Cormier told me. The camera’s frame rate was way too slow for the accident it was trying to capture. “In the time it takes to strike platform and be over, you may not record any frames at all. You may totally miss it. And if you do, you're missing important data that you'd need for analysis,” Cormier said.

That flaw means the calculations made from the video can’t be terribly accurate and, contrary to Jenkyn’s goals, they’re unlikely to be more accurate than or to add to the calculations that scientists come up with from laboratory experiments — experiments that are done with the aid of high-speed video and built-in measurement systems that record the forces directly, rather than calculating them indirectly from measurements in a video. What’s more, Duma pointed out, Jenkyn’s analysis relies on a lot of assumptions about variables (how quickly the kid’s face would decelerate when it hit the dock, for instance) that add unknowns to the equation, rather than subtracting them. If you wanted to get accurate measurements based on the video, Duma said, you’d need to go out to the site and reconstruct the accident on the actual dock, using a dummy body. “They're just estimating this stuff from the literature so the model is very crude and not state of the art,” he said. While Jenkyn’s team comes up with an estimate of the impact force being 1910 Newtons and 47.8 Newtons of force necessary to cause the actual fracture, this isn’t any different from what we already knew about these kind of accidents, in general. “If it were written 20 years ago, it would have been interesting,” Duma said.

That’s not to say that there’s no value in video analysis. In fact, both Duma and Cormier pointed me towards the work of Elliot Pellman and David Viano, who use video footage of professional football tackles to better understand the forces that affect players. Those studies use high quality video that captures the actual impact from multiple angles. They also then recreate the impacts with crash test dummies rigged up in elaborate harness systems. One of these studies, published in the journal Neurosurgery in October 2003, was the first to discover that players who suffered head impacts, but didn’t end up with a concussion, were being hit in very different places compared to players who did get concussions.* Their data suggested that there should be more emphasis on enforcing rules that protect players from unexpected tackles from the side or the back — hits that were disproportionately involved in concussions, compared to hits on the front crown of the helmet.

Ultimately, this all boils down to a simple equation: Force = mass x acceleration. How heavy an object is, times how fast that object changes speed becomes the force acting on the object. It’s the job of injury biomechanics researchers to figure out what masses and what kinds of impacts lead to the kind of forces that cause serious injuries. It’s also their job to figure out what force causes what kinds of injuries. Then, they put it all together and figure out how to reduce the force of impact to the point that it doesn’t cause a certain injury. That’s what an airbag is all about — if you lengthen the amount of time it takes a human body to come to a stop in a car accident, then you reduce the force acting on them, and you reduce and change the injuries they suffer. A better football helmet can do that same job. One of the big successes of the last decade in injury biomechanics is a helmet rating system, based on research that showed us the level of acceleration necessary to cause a concussion, Duma said. The better the rating on the helmet, the more it does to reduce that level of acceleration down to something safer.

Video can certainly help scientists as they try to learn this stuff. Good quality video can show us exactly the kind of impacts people experience in the real world. It can answer questions like where concussed football players are actually being hit. But the video, itself, shouldn’t be the end of the story. It’s only useful if it leads to a recreation of the accident, to a more realistic laboratory experiment. Estimated accelerations and estimated mass don’t lead to important changes in safety. It’s the exact measurements that come from lab tests that tell us something really valuable.

(*This particular paper has been widely praised by other researchers in the field. That said, Elliot Pellman lost a lot of his credibility in more recent years because of his support for official NFL positions downplaying concerns about concussions, especially the neurological effects of repeat concussions. It’s best to think of this as some good research produced by a guy who has a bad reputation for interpreting his own research in really problematic ways.)

http://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/the-science-of-faceplanting.html/feed0The Internet may be producing an excess of penguin sweatershttp://boingboing.net/2014/03/06/the-internet-may-be-producing.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/06/the-internet-may-be-producing.html#commentsThu, 06 Mar 2014 17:20:26 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=291022The Guardian reports that the Phillips Island Penguin Foundation in Australia is asking volunteers to knit sweaters for penguins being rehabilitated after oil spills.]]>The Guardian reports that the Phillips Island Penguin Foundation in Australia is asking volunteers to knit sweaters for penguins being rehabilitated after oil spills. Back in 2011, Dean wrote here about a similar request. The catch: That earlier plea for penguin sweaters (in fact, every earlier plea for penguin sweaters) has produced far, far more penguin sweaters than penguins actually need. For instance, in 2000, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust requested 100 sweaters and received 15,000. Yes, penguins wearing sweaters are cute, but it may be a good idea to contact the Phillips Island Penguin Foundation directly before you get started knitting. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/03/06/the-internet-may-be-producing.html/feed0Disneyside's social media memefesthttp://boingboing.net/2013/11/05/disneysides-social-media-mem.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/05/disneysides-social-media-mem.html#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 00:29:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=266389
As previously mentioned, I'm doing a six-week stint with Disney Imagineering in Glendale, and today I got to spend the day hanging out at Disneyland for the launch of Disneyside, an initiative that asks Disney fans to share photos and videos of themselves having fun at the Disney parks.]]>
As previously mentioned, I'm doing a six-week stint with Disney Imagineering in Glendale, and today I got to spend the day hanging out at Disneyland for the launch of Disneyside, an initiative that asks Disney fans to share photos and videos of themselves having fun at the Disney parks. To kick it off, Disney brought in a bunch of people (and animals) with large social media footprints, from Grumpy Cat to the folks behind Conversations With My Two Year Old, a video series we're very fond of around here.

The Conversations guys put together a great Disneyside video for the launch, but, alas it won't go live for a couple weeks. I did, however, get to fanboy with them for a couple of minutes afterward, and found them to be rather delightful.

David Milchard (who plays the two year old) described his bewilderment at the series' success, and confessed that he wasn't well-versed in electronic media: "I only discovered what Pintrest was last night."

Matthew Clarke (Dad) added, "I thought it was a site where people posted things of interest to Harold Pinter. You know, long pauses."

Clarke and I talked about our daughters, and I asked him about his feelings on princesshood and princess-y role play. He said that he'd feared that his daughter would be sucked into the princess world, and that indeed she became pretty princessified despite his not taking any steps in that direction. "It just naturally happened. But it's not like she just plays with princesses. She'll put a princess and a dump truck in the same play scenario. I'm certainly not going to tell her not to do that. I don't want to discourage or push things on her."

These days, the series is more "Conversations With My Three Year Old" than "...Two Year Old," and the friends are striving to get another season out this year, in between day jobs writing, teaching, acting and doing standup in Vancouver. They commiserated about falling YouTube rates, and suggested that they were writing both TV and Internet treatments for a post-"Conversations..." followup.

For a couple of guys who'd just sat in front of Small World in the LA noontime sun meeting fans, they were in pretty good form. The event was great fun, and I'm looking forward to the time when I can share their Disneyside video with you. In the meantime, here are my photos from the event.
]]>

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/05/disneysides-social-media-mem.html/feed0Meet Ancient Peru's own Grumpy Cathttp://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/meet-ancient-perus-own-grump.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/meet-ancient-perus-own-grump.html#commentsWed, 31 Jul 2013 12:00:40 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=246416Grumpy Cat, Shocked Cat, Lil Bub – their images are the currency of the web, passed between friends, family, and co-workers.]]>Grumpy Cat, Shocked Cat, Lil Bub – their images are the currency of the web, passed between friends, family, and co-workers. When they go viral, funny cat pictures heal daily drudgery with a dose of furry, cuddly cheer. But, in terms of the reverence they receive, these cats are hardly the first of their kind. Ancient cultures had cat memes too, and archaeologists have their own term for them: feline motifs.

The word meme, itself a meme, feels ultra-modern, but was coined in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins to refer to any non-genetic unit of replicated information. And it would be chronocentric to presume this term applied only to the proverbial Caturdays following its contemporary articulation. Some archaeologists, known as evolutionary archaeologists, incorporate memetics into their explanations of cultural transmission and change. In their view, cultural evolution, or the speciation of different cultures, happens by selective forces acting on cultural memes, motifs and styles.

We can look back about two thousand years and see cat memes on objects made in the Americas before Columbus set boot here. In fact, the feline motif is a powerful point of acccess to Pre-Columbian cultures, as it was a common from the Mississippi to the tip of South America.

MEET OLD GRUMPY CAT

Take a dour little kitty artifact that resides in the American Museum of Natural History. He is Grumpy Cat’s distant cousin. Let’s call him Old Grumpy Cat, or OGC. Museum officials call him a ceramic bottle, and say he probably came from Northern Peru. Created about 2,000 years ago, he was likely used for special ceremonies, then part of a burial. Centuries later, he was dug up by grave looters and sold to collectors, ultimately making his way to his museum home and an afterlife of staring at the world from behind glass.

The vessel was not excavated by academics, so we don’t know exactly where, or when, he is from. Since soil accumulates in layers year after year, archaeologists usually determine age of objects that can’t be carbon-dated by their relation to other objects within the same deposition layer. No such luck with Old Grumpy.

Knowing what species is represented could offer a critical clue, but Old Grumpy is ambiguous. This line of thought, however, can still lead to useful insights.

For example, wild cat conservationists in South America point out that historically-rooted feline reverence makes cat-hunting less likely, helping preserving the ecosystems they inhabit. Even if not sacred per se, cats can be symbols of the regions they inhabit, a source of pride, which, conservationist argue, can save cats’ lives.

Archaeology can also provide data for biologists, as in a recent case in Mediterranean fish biology. Conservationists identified grouper, a species now endangered in the area, in pre-Christian mosaic art. This allowed estimates of the size of ancient groupers and their historic ranges, thus putting an endangered species into a bigger timeline.

SO, WHERE IZ I FROM?

Archaeologists like to group cultures by their ceramics. In Northern Peru, steep mountain ranges abut Pacific beaches. Ancient peoples thrived along rivers that run perpendicular to this coastline. Coastal cultures rose and fell in these valleys over thousands of years, each with a signature style of pottery.

Nearly a dozen archaeologists that I spoke with agreed that the color and pattern of Old Grumpy Cat suggest the Virú river valley in Northern Peru.

OGC’s creators used a technique called resist glazing, in which wax was pressed onto a fired pot to make a design. It was then dipped into liquid glaze, which could not adhere to the waxed areas. When the pot was fired, the glaze became glassy and the wax melted away, leaving behind the design. Archaeologists most often attribute resist style to a group that inhabited the Virú valley between 500BC and 1000AD; however, there is ambiguity. On the North coast, resist style was also used by a slightly earlier culture called the Salinar, the later cultures of Chavín and Moche, as well as a culture up the coast called Vicús.

Beyond this decorative style, the people of the Virú valley are known also to have used small, not so fierce looking feline motifs in their ceramics. OGC represents a small spotted cat with striped front legs. This motif had wide currency in the region, as it is also found far to south in petroglyphs associated with the Wari people.

The feline meme evolved, and the time of the Inca (about 1400AD), the most commonly depicted cat was a jaguar, whose meme was so stylized it could be represented by its fangs alone. Some archaeologists propose that meditation on the jaguar meme became a shamanistic ritual, in which ceramic bottles held corn beer called chicha: OGC’s little tail is actually a drinking spout.

SPEESHEEZ, PLEEZ?

Old Grumpy Cat was probably not meant to be a realistic portrait. Even 2,000 years ago, it’s unlikely there were cats with spiral spots. There were no housecats (domesticated Felis sylvestris) in the Americas then, but there were small wild cats. Was Old Grumpy Cat meant to depict one in particular?

There are now ten species of wild cat in South America, eight found in Peru. Each species can look a little different depending on age and location. So, although he doesn’t look much like an adult jaguar (Panthera onca), for example, OGC could be a jaguar kitten. Or a puma (Puma concolor), an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or even a margay (Leopardus weidii).

However, the striping on his front legs of suggests one of two species in particular.

The Andean mountain cat (aka Leopardus jacobita) is the rarest small wild cat in the world, and the only endangered wild cat in the Americas, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. If Old Grumpy Cat was modeled on this species, he might now have good reason to be frowning. The very existence of living L. jacobita was only confirmed in the past 20 or so years, and its high and dry mountain habitat is very rapidly disappearing as climate change melts the glaciers of the Andes.

DNA evidence confirms modern Andean cat scat about 200km south of the Virú valley, near the scene of the meme.

The other possible species is the Andean cat’s cousin, the Pampas cat (aka Leopardus colocolo). Pampas’ appearance is more variable than the Andean cat, but at the Northernmost reaches of their range Pampas cats tend to have striped legs and tails, with some spots on the back, just like OGC. Indeed, biologists often use genetic tools to definitively distinguish between Andean and Pampas cats, by analyzing DNA that is sloughed off from the cats’ intestines into their droppings.

Even if their historic ecological range brought them near the Virú valley, could the makers of Old Grumpy cat have distinguished Andean cats from Pampas cats by eye?

Besides the handful of biologists who have seen them in the wild, local herders and villagers in the Andean mountains know the difference.

From 1998 to 1999 and 2001 to 2002, a conservation study in Bolivia quizzed mountain residents with photos of the two cats. They lump all small wild cats together into a group they call “titi,” but researchers found that about 18 percent of people considered there to be two different kinds of titi. Moreover, they had different names for the two titis, and described them as living in different habitats with distinct mannerisms.

The Pampas cat was called gato chaskoso, or scruffy cat, while the Andean cat was called gato sonso, or silly cat. The rare sighting of either cat is considered to bring good fortune, but seeing scruffy cat is good luck in general while silly cat brings a good harvest and protects livestock. In fact, according to researchers, locals believe that accidentally killing a silly cat creates a debt to nature that must be atoned annually, and the stuffed pelt is decorated with streamers and kept as household talisman. This modern cat reverence tracks with archaeological hypothesis about the roots of cat worship. Ancient farmers observed that small wild cats killed rodents that would otherwise eat up their crops. Cat health and well-being was a concern of these early agricultural societies.

I IZ WHAT I IZ.

Taxonomy is a way of charting relationships between things. It is a modern and scientific way of seeing the world. In terms of the lumping and splitting of ancient cultures or modern cat species, descendants of Andean cultures might have another perspective. When asked what species OGC is, archaeologist Nick Saunders points out that the Western urge for taxonomy is not always in sync with indigenous reality.

In ancient, and modern, Andean cultures, “either a one-for-one identification is inappropriate, or different features of different felines (and/or other animals) are recombined in ways which made eminent sense to their creators but totally confuse us,” he wrote.

For example, jaguar spots could be painted on a depiction of another animal, to endow that animal with jaguar powers.

Taxonomy means saying an object or animal is THIS and NOT THAT. In modern Andean cultures, there’s evidence of a less binary way of thinking. The Aymara language (spoken by about two million people throughout Peru and Bolivia) conceptualizes time with the future behind and the past is laid out in front of a person, analogous to being a passenger in a rear-facing train seat. Speakers point to their back when gesturing about future events, and forward when describing the past.

Aymara also uses a three-part, or ternary, logic system. In addition to TRUE and FALSE there is a third, equally valid option, meaning something similar to "not enough information." This has also been called Andean logic. Ternary logic systems can be really useful in describing the universe, be it the universe of perception or a set of data: consider the NULL state, used in databases to distinguish an entry that does not exist from one that represents nothing.

It is only fitting, then, that Old Grumpy Cat defies categorization. He pops out of his museum case, suddenly seeming more relevant because of his resemblance to Grumpy Cat. Maybe he has something to say about climate change effects on wild cats of the Andes, or maybe he tells of sophisticated and underappreciated indigenous people of the Americas, both ancient and modern. Maybe the spiral on the side of Old Grumpy Cat represents time, and overlap of culture and generations in the same physical space. If we assume time will continue into the future (whether we envision that as in front or behind us), perhaps future archeologists will find a Grumpy Cat coffee mug 2,000 years from now and wonder about us.
]]>

Laina, AKA "Overly Attached Girlfriend" (a YouTube comedian and memestar who trades on her ability to stare intensely while monologuing hilariously about her terrifying romantic attachment) has outdone herself with an Uncle Sam edition, commenting on Prism

Warner Brothers is facing a federal lawsuit for using two feline-themed Internet memes in a video game without their creators' permission. The authors of "Keyboard Cat" and "Nyan Cat" have sued the media giant arguing that the game Scribblenauts, published by WB Games, infringes their copyrights and trademarks. The game's developer, 5th Cell, is also named in the lawsuit.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/05/03/lawsuit-warner-brothers-a-cat.html/feed32TODOCAT: a cat-meme-based to-do-list managerhttp://boingboing.net/2013/04/17/todocat-a-cat-meme-based-to-d.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/17/todocat-a-cat-meme-based-to-d.html#commentsThu, 18 Apr 2013 02:43:26 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=224981
Soma of the Brooklyn Brainery created TODOCAT, a to-do list manager based on the elegant cat meme. I fucking hate cat memes, but I love to-do lists.]]>
Soma of the Brooklyn Brainery created TODOCAT, a to-do list manager based on the elegant cat meme. I fucking hate cat memes, but I love to-do lists. I love this cat meme to-do list manager.

http://boingboing.net/2012/12/11/monkey-ikea-beast-jesus.html/feed12Overly attached undead girlfriendhttp://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/overly-attached-undead-girlfri.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/overly-attached-undead-girlfri.html#commentsThu, 01 Nov 2012 22:26:27 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=191505
Laina Walker, better known as "Overly Attached Girlfriend," has treated her legion of fans to a zombified version of her face for the season.]]>
Laina Walker, better known as "Overly Attached Girlfriend," has treated her legion of fans to a zombified version of her face for the season. Let the memes begin!

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/07/sociology-student-sheep-have-f.html/feed13Monkey Jesus cosplayerhttp://boingboing.net/2012/10/03/monkey-jesus-cosplayer.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/03/monkey-jesus-cosplayer.html#commentsWed, 03 Oct 2012 15:42:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=185101
Here's a Monkey Jesus/restored icon cosplayer in full regalia. The identity of the person behind the mask is the source of controversy: it was posted to Reddit by OhioUPilot12, whose description implied that s/he was the creator of the costume.]]>
Here's a Monkey Jesus/restored icon cosplayer in full regalia. The identity of the person behind the mask is the source of controversy: it was posted to Reddit by OhioUPilot12, whose description implied that s/he was the creator of the costume. However, when Spinjump posted that this had been her/his Anime Weekend Atlanta costume, OhioUPilot12 backpedaled and claimed that the original description was an unfortunate misunderstanding.

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/03/monkey-jesus-cosplayer.html/feed10Commodity market prediction takes the Internet by stormhttp://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/commodity-market-prediction-ta.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/commodity-market-prediction-ta.html#commentsThu, 27 Sep 2012 19:59:06 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=184043 Key takeaways: There will still be meat, it's just going to be more spendy next year, and also don't trust the British when they offer you "bacon" because they actually mean Canadian bacon, which is different (and inferior). ]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/commodity-market-prediction-ta.html/feed54PSY foam-arthttp://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/psy-foam-art.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/psy-foam-art.html#commentsWed, 26 Sep 2012 22:31:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=183678
Redditor DivineBaboon posted an unattributed photo of an espresso drink with a beautiful PSY (of Gangnam Style fame) portrait in the foam.]]>
Redditor DivineBaboon posted an unattributed photo of an espresso drink with a beautiful PSY (of Gangnam Style fame) portrait in the foam.

For the next 60 years or so—basically, until everyone roughly my age has died off—former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens will be widely remembered (and mocked) for once describing the Internet as "a series of tubes".

]]>

For the next 60 years or so—basically, until everyone roughly my age has died off—former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens will be widely remembered (and mocked) for once describing the Internet as "a series of tubes".

But here's the thing. It's easy to make fun of Ted Stevens. It's harder (much harder) to explain quickly and at a relatively simple level—for lay people with no tech background—what actually happens when they call up a web page.

That's why Greg Boustead and the nice folks at the World Science Festival put together this short video, explaining the basics of the Internet, specifically the basics of packet switching. The video should help the average person understand the Internet just a little better and it has been run by several experts for accuracy, Boustead says.

I have to admit that when I had to screen it for "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, who invented this process, I was more than a little nervous, certain he would pick it apart. When he replied with "This is so good - can I please use it to explain the concept of packets at public lectures," needless to say, I was over the moon.

So, the Internet. It's not a big truck. It's not a series of tubes. It's more like a bus full of tourists.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/fing-internet-how-does-it.html/feed39Mispronounced tech termshttp://boingboing.net/2012/05/07/mispronounced-tech-terms.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/05/07/mispronounced-tech-terms.html#commentsMon, 07 May 2012 16:17:39 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=159007the right pronuncuations for all sorts of nerd words like "GIF" and "meme" -- if not the correct ones.]]>the right pronuncuations for all sorts of nerd words like "GIF" and "meme" -- if not the correct ones. [Slacktory]]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/05/07/mispronounced-tech-terms.html/feed30Forever Alone statuehttp://boingboing.net/2012/04/26/forever-alone-sculpture.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/26/forever-alone-sculpture.html#commentsThu, 26 Apr 2012 14:39:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=156860Matt Scone and sculptor Sanden Henning offer this splendid Forever Alone sculpture. Despite there being only 30 in the limited edition run, they're only $79 each: "We learned a bunch on the whole process of making a toy and shipping it to the US from overseas.]]>Matt Scone and sculptor Sanden Henning offer this splendid Forever Alone sculpture. Despite there being only 30 in the limited edition run, they're only $79 each: "We learned a bunch on the whole process of making a toy and shipping it to the US from overseas. We invested about 2.5k into the project, in fact we're still losing money selling them. But we had fun working on the project so it's not all a lost."

Scone describes the development and manufacturing process:

1) We had a 3D render of the statue made
2) 3D printed it, which is really expensive but getting cheaper by the day
3) Cast a mould around the figure
4) Had 30 of them made in resin
5) Hand paint them
6) Custom packaging
7) Ship from China to the States

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/04/26/forever-alone-sculpture.html/feed13CISPAcat: using memes to fight America's terrible, net-breaking "cybersecurity" billhttp://boingboing.net/2012/04/21/cispacat-using-memes-to-fight.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/21/cispacat-using-memes-to-fight.html#commentsSat, 21 Apr 2012 13:11:20 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=155833
Zakkai from Fight for the Future (the folks who brought you the war on SOPA) sez, "Want to fight for Internet privacy with cute cat photos?]]>
Zakkai from Fight for the Future (the folks who brought you the war on SOPA) sez, "Want to fight for Internet privacy with cute cat photos? CISPAcat is a new advice animal that wants nothing more than to spy on your internet activity. He's the child of the privacy-killing cybersecurity bill CISPA and the equally creepy ceiling cat. Check him out and submit your own. Curious why CISPA is so bad? Read about it at the EFF's website."

Last week, lost in a haze of book tour, I found myself at brunch with several friends who were talking about a YouTube meme I'd entirely missed—people attempting to eat whole spoonfuls of cinnamon and failing miserably.

]]>

Last week, lost in a haze of book tour, I found myself at brunch with several friends who were talking about a YouTube meme I'd entirely missed—people attempting to eat whole spoonfuls of cinnamon and failing miserably. (Warning, the video ends in tears and heaving.)

While others wonder "why?" or, perhaps, "why not?", we here at BoingBoing prefer to ask, "No, seriously, how does that work?" Luckily, Jason Bittel at BittelMeThis had the answer. Turns out, humans are generally doomed to fail the Cinnamon Challenge for a very specific scientific reason—we need things to be lubricated in order to swallow them.

The spice that magically transforms dough and sugar into a sticky bun is actually ground up tree bark, which means we’re talking about a lot of water-resistant cellulose. And according to retired physical chemist Vince Calder, the rest is “a mixture of volatile organic compounds, a major component being cinnamanaldehyde, which is not very water soluble.”

If you want to see this in action without risking asphyxiation, put a tablespoon of cinnamon in a bowl and jostle it until the powder is level. Using a straw, allow a drop of water to fall on the surface. Instead of saturating the cinnamon – like it would with sugar – the water just beads up and rolls around like the liquid seed of a rusty T1000.

In a nutshell, all of this means that the Cinnamon Challenge can, in fact, be fairly dangerous.

Some game developers are raising Kickstarter money to fund a production run of For the Win, a fun-looking tile-game based on net memes.

]]>

Some game developers are raising Kickstarter money to fund a production run of For the Win, a fun-looking tile-game based on net memes. The developers have a good track-record for producing great games funded through Kickstarter:

For The Win is an abstract game at heart, with a solid theme of internet memes applied. Players control a host of characters, playing them to the board and using their powers in order to arrange a group of all 5 types. Each character has thematic abilities in this easy to learn and fast playing game:

* The Zombie turns non-zombies into zombies.
* The Pirate shoots people out of cannons, moving them wherever you want.
* The Ninja through the power of stealth can disappear and reappear wherever desired.
* The Alien utilizes its tractor bean to pull people next to it.
* The Monkey messes everything up and toggles all of her neighbors.

Be the first person to get one of each adjacent to each other, FOR THE WIN!